So it took a bit longer than Thanksgiving weekend.

I haven’t been posting much because really, how many times can I post about scraping?  But this is a celebratory post, because as of Saturday, December 12th, the scraping was done!

I have no idea what I was smoking when I thought that we would be finished scraping by the end of Thanksgiving weekend.  Maybe I was in denial.  Whatever it was, it was clear by the Friday after Thanksgiving that it wasn’t going to happen.  Even if that Saturday hadn’t been a rain day, we still wouldn’t have finished.  However, we did make some progress by the end of that weekend, and by the following Saturday we were VERY close to completion:

Honestly, we could have finished on Sunday the 6th, but I went on strike.  I had blisters on my hands from the day before, and I decided that one weekend day off from physical labor was completely reasonable.

So on Saturday the 12th we drove back down to Shenny.  It was an amazing 60+ degrees, and by god, we were going to finish that day.  And we did!

In hindsight, the job really wasn’t that bad.  We got lucky in that we (unknowingly) picked the hardest side to do first.  For some reason the paint on the starboard side was much more tenacious, while the port side came off relatively easily.  I estimated the entire job took less than 24 hours, and that included set up and clean up:

We put in an average of three hours each week (about all I was good for), and only worked on it one day each weekend.  It wasn’t technically difficult, but it was absolutely grunt work.  There’s no way we’ll do it again.  I’m really glad that we don’t have a bigger boat!

So after all of that, what’s next?  Why sanding the bottom of course!  People at Shenny have assured us that sanding won’t be as difficult.  We’re hoping they’re right.

The plan is to spend one day each weekend sanding, and the other day working on other projects.  The months are flying by and we only have 4 1/2 months to splash, so we need to get going!